As if everyone didn’t already think of Berlin as paradise,“Naked Boys Reading” will take place there tomorrow. Which, for clarification, appears to comprise attractive men reading things naked. [iHeartBerlin]

Money may be an obsolete concept in the evolved, post-capitalist, interplanetary society of the 24th century, but today is a different story. Wil Wheaton (of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame) sounds off about how sites like The Huffington Post should actually pay contributors. On behalf of writers everywhere, thanks. [WilWheaton.net]

Religious fundamentalists smuggling looted antiquities from the Middle East? Nope, this story isn’t about ISIS—it’s about the Green family, owners of the birth-control-hating-craft-store-chain Hobby Lobby. They’re using their fortune and questionable scruples to construct the Museum of the Bible a block or two from the US Capitol Building in Washington, DC. Customs agents seized between 200 and 300 cuneiform tablets that appear to have been illegally imported for the endeavor. [The Art Newspaper]

This is so, so great. Goldsmiths—the London art school that launched the YBAs to fame—has announced that it is giving away six scholarships to asylum seekers in light of the refugee crisis. [ARTnews]

Speaking of art schools and displaced people, the Pratt Institute is evicting its 79 year old head engineer from campus housing, where he has lived since 1967. That is truly terrible. Can you imagine trying to find a Brooklyn apartment after 50 years? [Gothamist]

WHOA. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is being rebooted as a television show on FOX starring actress/activist Laverne Cox. SO MANY MIXED EMOTIONS. [Blouin Artinfo]

The Denver Art Museum has a long history of collecting and exhibiting Native American artwork, now they’re trying to highlight contemporary Native American artists. One interesting challenge? Crediting individual artists in their legacy collection, rather than identifying artworks by tribal origin, as museums have done historically. [The New York Times]

There is a hidden promise built into the act of making a photograph, particularly with portraiture. A hint of salvation, as if the camera can act as a portal to a better place. This would obviously be more pronounced in places like prisons, conflict zones or psychiatric hospitals but even on the street we were bewildered when people agreed. At about the time this doubt started creeping in we both read a remarkable book by Janet Malcolm called “The Journalist and the Murderer,” where she wonders incredulously why anyone would reveal so much to a journalist, in her experience often more than she felt they would reveal to a shrink. We began to feel the same about images. Why would anyone agree to being photographed without a full understanding of the potential political, cultural and economic currency of the images. That eco-system, the moral, political and financial world that images work in began to interest us more than the individual images. So our work began to look at revealing the mechanisms at work around image making, distribution and consumption. Its hard to do this if you’re just making pictures which for the most part leaves you at the bottom of this powerful food chain. [CPHmag via: Greg.org]

Another start-up that wants to put more art on people’s walls. ARTtwo50 is an iPad app that allows users to picture what a work would look like over their couch or above their bed. Once the customer has chosen the art work, ARTtwo50 will “demystify” the pricing structure of the art world by pricing all the art on the site $250. [TechCrunch]

Richard Phillips has come up with a rescue plan for Detroit: Detroit Basel. [Twitter]

Is the art work critical of capitalism on display at the Goldsmith’s MFA show actually complicit with it? “A Letter to Goldsmiths art students on capitalism, art and pseudo-critique” [Prolapsarian via Bad at Sports]

The West is recognizing bizarre, old Japanese porn as art. Japan is not as keen on the idea. [Bloomberg]

There’s no better barometer for the state of higher education than undergraduate arts degrees, the traditional first-against-the-wall of government spending cuts. Goldsmiths has this year seen a 23% drop in applications after implementing the highest-possible undergraduate tuition fee of £9000 per year. This follows a 20% cut in spending on university arts programmes, in favour of what the UK government calls, disingenuously, “priority subjects.”

While the institution holds its breath for funding, its BA graduating show—the last before the fees come into effect this autumn—embodies, in conceptual rigour and discreet politics, an argument for the value of arts education that’s no less potent for having been lost.